Nicaragua is a country of young people. With sixty percent of the population under the age of 35, this is a condition that can present itself as either an opportunity or a barrier to the civic mobilization that the country needs to curb the indecencies of the traditional powers.
For many years I maintained a certain distance from feminists. This was likely due to the fact that my telescope for surveying the women’s struggle was “macho-Leninist”.
In Nicaragua, visitors are struck by the reiterated invocation of “the Revolution” in official public discourse and comments by rank-and-file activists of the ruling party.
To travel to Nicaragua had been an enduring dream, one I had yearned since childhood when my parents left me in the care of my grandparents to go to that Central America to offer internationalist support, first to the Sandinista Front guerrilla movement and later to the revolutionary government.
After a prolonged break imposed by one of those terrible “occupational diseases” (tendinitis), I am now returning to this column with Havana Times and am filled with the desire to share my ideas and experiences.
Are Che and Pol Pot equivalent? Are the Paris Commune and the gulags the same? Will the Polish ruling reach the point of criminalizing the image and memory of their compatriot, Rosa Luxemburg, the same person who demanded freedom for who thought differently from her.
Recently, in a discussion with some Latin American colleagues I stressed the need to consider the social disasters resulting from the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile as outcomes of the neoliberal experiment.
For Cuban citizens it is virtually impossible (and punishable) to formally testify against, monitor or criticize any alleged human rights violation committed by officials or state institutions —on occasion contrary to its own 1992 socialist constitution— given the capacity for social control by the State and the subordination of the mass media to government directives.
To differentiate “Revolution” from “Regime” is not a capricious or pejorative classification, but instead offers the possibility of constructing a critique from the left. This can assist in delineating a new socialist project and in reclaiming the emancipatory content threatened in our country by bureaucratic immobility, the conservative pressures of daily life and the forces of neo-liberal restoration.
The arguments around “imperialistic hostility” and “media terrorism” are losing their genuine value in the face of abuse exercised to hide a totalitarian bent.